I'm Sorry
by ncfan
Summary: It was the last thing Sakura ever heard him say. It had become something of a mantra for him, "I'm sorry...I'm sorry...I'm sorry..."


Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

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The rain pattered on the newly barren ground; the sudden lack of trees in the area made great mud slicks likely.

"I'm sorry," Naruto choked out, staring desperately up at her. His blue eyes were shimmering in tears and fading life. "_I'm sorry._"

Sakura stared down at him, and tried to think how this had happened. It had all happened so fast; it seemed almost yesterday that he was a bright, obnoxiously cheerful little boy, instead of a grown, broken man who strove for something he could never get back.

Sasuke was gone. He had walked away from them for the last time, with nary a glance back to them. He was like a column of ice now, cold, rigid and unfeeling. He would wipe blood off of his katana later with nary a twitch of any muscle or emotion. Revenge had consumed him, and Sakura couldn't recognize him any more than she could discern any of the old Naruto in the new.

The grit and grime swirled around her feet and choked and clogged in Naruto's hair and clothes, commingling with red to form a swirling eddy of viscous wet, slipping through grooves and trenches in the ground.

"I'm sorry." His mantra now, fleeing from his lips with alarming frequency like a fleshless being trying to outrun mortality.

Sakura felt stock-still, the river that had for so long raged around her legs starting to slack off ever so slightly. Her hands were limp at her side; she didn't heal, or injure, or save. She just watched.

How had it come to this? It was like only a day had passed—Sakura couldn't believe that any more than a day had passed—that Sasuke took her breath and drank her in with cold darkness one last time before he finally washed his hands of their sad, corrupt little village—where the breakers of families and the destroyers of men played chess with shinobi for little carved pawns, sitting still while wars of their own devising erupted all around them—to seek the one thing that he thought would quell his roaring darkness.

How wrong he had been. Sasuke hadn't woken up when he killed Itachi; he only fell into a darker sleep.

When Sakura was faced with her failures, as her two beloved boys jolted towards each other like two stars spiraling towards oblivion, she could only watch and wonder…

_How did it all come to this?_

"Sa-kura." Naruto's barely audible gasp was like a piece of rusty machinery breathing its last decrepit breath, uneven and drawn.

Sakura's eyes, which had fixed on the horizon, were now again drawn irresistibly downwards.

She saw his face, whisker marks darks as coal, red fading out of his eyes to unmask shining cobalt, tears falling like a lacy veil over his torso and—_Oh, God._

And a weeping crimson hole where his stomach had been.

Sakura didn't feel her knees collapse; she didn't feel her body fall against the mud, and the water swirl around her. She didn't feel Naruto's blood clot in her hair. All she felt was the terrible grief of his eyes, eyes that saw her soul no matter how she sought to hide it, eyes that exposed and made naked her culpability and her weakness, the weakness that had been his ruin.

_My fault…All my fault…_

_And a brother fell upon a brother, and he slew him._ She saw, she understood now. The Kyuubi couldn't save him this time, couldn't bring him back like it always had before.

But then, Sasuke and Naruto both had planned it that way. The only crinkle was Sasuke not dying with him.

"Sakura." The words were garbled through a bruised and twisted mouth; many of the teeth on his upper jaw were knocked out or left with deep gashes—_What costs have you paid for your devotion to me, why did I drive you to this place, why, why, why…_—, and most of his lower lip was misplaced and scattered upon the mud.

"Sakura." She bowed her head, too horrified to bear his face in her sight, and just barely willing herself to heed his failing words. "I…couldn't bring him…home."

"_I'm sorry._"

_Oh, God, please don't, please don't. Don't make this my fault, don't say sorry, stop saying _sorry_…_

Even as Sakura threw herself across his cold chest, even as she convulsed and bled and _drowned_ in her grief and her guilt, even as Sasuke drew even further away from sanity and light and the whole world began to feel licks of flame upon it, she heard his voice, on every raindrop, chiming his mantra.

_I'm sorry…_

_I'm sorry…_

_I'm sorry…_

_I'm sorry…_

She was sorry too.


End file.
